Join Harvard Professor Ian Jared Miller for this exciting talk about the history and future of energy generation!
How did electricity and fossil fuels become so central to everyday modern life? What does the history of those revolutionary changes have to tell us about the prospects for “energy transition” as we grapple with the realities of fossil-fueled climate change? This talk takes us far away and long ago in order to better understand the beginnings of industrial culture, exploring the advent of a new age in the world’s largest city, Tokyo, a global capital whose story has implications for all of us as we look ahead to a shared energy future.

Ian J. Miller is Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in History and Faculty Dean of Cabot House at Harvard University, where he teaches courses on the history of Japan as well as topics in energy, environment, and climate. His current writing, supported in part by a 3-year Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship on “Carbon and its Discontents,” is focused on his next book, Fueling Tokyo: Japan in the Age of Global Energy. He has published in journals and venues from The New York Times to Environmental History and Japanese Studies. He is author of The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo and co-editor (with Julia Adeney Thomas and Brett L. Walker) of Japan at Nature’s Edge: The Environmental Context of a Global Power. His next major publication, Oceanic Japan: The Archipelago in Pacific and Global History, co-edited with Nadin Hee, Stefan Huebner, and William Tsutsui is forthcoming November 2024